Friday, 28 May 2010

In a new survey of the world's best cities, London is the only UK entry in the top 50. So, where are the best places to live?

Every year, consulting group Mercer releases its annual Quality of Living Survey. This survey ranks the world's cities using a wide range of useful criteria, to reflect the quality of living in those cities, so that global firms can fairly recompense any employee they send abroad.

What makes a great city?

The 2010 report is now out, covering 221 of the world's capital and major cities. The firm's worldwide rankings are produced using 39 factors in ten categories, including:

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1. Political and social environment (political stability, crime, law enforcement)

Mercer produces individual reports for each country and then ranks them in order, using New York City as its baseline with a score of 100. Its latest report was compiled between September and November 2009.

Bad news for Brits

The disappointing news for the UK is that only one of our cities -- London -- makes it into the top 50 in Mercer's list of the most desirable places to live.

Here's where the UK's leading cities appear in Mercer's list (plus Dublin, for comparison):

UK city Rank

Dublin, Ireland 26

London 39

Aberdeen 53

Birmingham 55

Glasgow 57

Belfast 63

London scored 101.6 on Mercer's ranking, making it a better place to live than Tokyo (in 40th place), Milan (41), Barcelona (44), Chicago (45), Madrid (48) and NYC (49).

The 20 best places to live

According to Mercer, these are the 20 best cities in which to live:

Rank City Country Score

1 Vienna Austria 108.6

2 Zurich Switzerland 108.0

3 Geneva Switzerland 107.9

4 Vancouver Canada 107.4

4 Auckland New Zealand 107.4

6 Dusseldorf Germany 107.2

7 Frankfurt Germany 107.0

7 Munich Germany 107.0

9 Bern Switzerland 106.5

10 Sydney Australia 106.3

11 Copenhagen Denmark 106.2

12 Wellington New Zealand 105.9

13 Amsterdam Netherlands 105.7

14 Ottawa Canada 105.5

15 Brussels Belgium 105.4

16 Toronto Canada 105.3

17 Berlin Germany 105.0

18 Melbourne Australia 104.8

19 Luxembourg Luxembourg 104.6

20 Stockholm Sweden 104.5

As you can see, the clean, safe and wealthy cities of Vienna, Zurich and Geneva top this list. On a country-by-country basis, Germany has 4 entries in this top 20; Canada and Switzerland have three apiece; Australia and New Zealand two each; and Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden each have one entry.

I have to admit that this chimes with my own experience of living and travelling abroad. But one criticism that I think could be levelled against some of the cities shown above is that they are ‘boring'. In other words, while I think they are fun to visit, I'd imagine that living there for years could be somewhat dull. Then again, expats and international workers often prefer to live in such cities to lower their stress levels, so this stability is no bad thing for them.

We should count our blessings

The lowest-scoring city in Mercer's survey (in 221st) place was Baghdad, the war-torn capital of Iraq, with a score of just 14.7. Often, cities fared poorly in the rankings because of political instability, economic woes, high levels of crime, poor sanitation, energy shortages and other problems.